Nischal Shetty led Shardeum raises $18.2 million in seed funding

• ByStartupStory     |    October 19, 2022

Shardeum, a shard blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), disclosed on Tuesday that it had received $18.2 million at a valuation of $200 million. Jane Street, Struck Crypto, The Spartan Group, Big Brain Holdings, DFG, Ghaf Capital Partners, and Foresight Ventures lead the round.

Marquee investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Mayur Gupta (CMO at Kraken), Michael Montero (Co-founder at Resy – acq. American Express and Co-Founder at CrowdTwist – acq. Oracle), Pankaj Gupta (VP Engineering at Coinbase), Harsh Rajat (Co-founder at Push Protocol), Nakul Gupta (Lead PM at Coinbase NFT Marketplace & Institutional Onboarding), Ajeet Khurana (Founder at Reflexical), Ravi Adusumalli (GP at Elevation Capital), Rohan Chauhan (Digital assets at Hudson River Trading), Ganesh Swami (Co-founder at Covalent), had participated in its seed round.

With the fresh capital raised, Shardeum is aiming to expand its team globally. “The idea is to hire more people and expand the team on the tech side of things, the business side, and the marketing side. We’ve got a good, distributed team from India, the US, Myanmar, Brazil, Japan, UK,” said Nishchal Shetty, co-founder of Shardeum.

Nischal Shetty and Omar Syed teamed together in 2022 to establish Shardeum, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible sharded blockchain with limitless scalability, decentralization, and security. Simply said, it tries to address the two major issues in blockchain today. It has low throughput and expensive gas or transaction costs.

Shetty, who oversaw India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange WazirX for several years, plans to extend Shardeum to other nations. To that purpose, he claims that the endeavor was made to limit the amount of money that any investor may put into the Shardeum captable. He further said, “That was part of the plan to make sure that we don’t have anyone who has a large stake in the network, to keep it as distributed as possible. We have investors from all continents including Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia, Europe. So that’s been a good mix of investors from around the world.”

While crypto markets fluctuated in 2022, Shetty thinks that crypto and web3 use is increasing in emerging economies such as Vietnam, India, Ukraine, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. However, he feels that, despite the enormous demand in these markets, trading is still prohibitively expensive.

Shetty said, “If you look at the blockchain today, in the bull run, there is an increase in fees like Ethereum costs $50- $100 transaction fees. That is an unsustainable way for a blockchain to grow. We are targeting a fee as low as one to two rupees per transaction, and no matter how many people use it, the fees will always remain low.” 

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